The Priestess' Tale
by Danny Barefoot
Summary: AU. WARNING serious violence. The young covent-raised orphan, accomplice and disciple to the most notorious racist murderer of the century, tells her story. And finds that there may be some good left in the world that she can do.


"They had this farm maybe ten, twelve years, out on the edge of town. The couple, grandparents, maybe seven, eight brats. Typical big goblin litter. Must've just finished paying their respects to that heathen abomination in the back yard, before chow-time. Trooped in and sat down. I'd say there were two men at the back door, three at the front. Cleansuit coveralls would mask their scent. They whacked the lock off with an axe, caught them all together…almost feel sorry for the little rats."

"You don't fragging say."

Detective Harry Fawkes, CPD, Serial Homicides Division, turned from the local Sheriff's ruddy face. It looked a typical wooden farmhouse, except for the totem pole in the back yard. Feathers shaking in the wind, as if fighting to escape. From a mile downwind, Fawkes had smelt cold blood.

"City folks don't get the problem," The sheriff groused, "You got the gangs, their filthy drugs. Green Power and fragging Goblin Rights, but my grandpappy can remember the War. No chance he'd forget what the greenskins did to his sister and her family. Gobbos don't forget either. Every month out here on the edges, you hear about cattle stolen, men swarmed and killed by night, our women–!"

"Right, so you've heard. Close your mouth and don't open it again." The sheriff caught Fawkes' eyes, and went _mousey_ quiet.

DS Lei and Detective Tresckow were scouring the farm's ragged fields with the uniforms. Fawkes saw a dark-haired figure–Susan Lei–drop to her knees. He started running.

Two goblins–young teenagers–must have got out of the open window. The male had a bullet wound in his thigh. The ground showed he had been dragged further away, by the female before two pursuers in combat boots had caught up to them. The female's claws were broken, she had defended herself–goblins were tough, for their size. She had been struck with a blunt instrument several times. Her clothes were scattered around her, torn, and dark blood had dried on her legs. Fawkes wondered if her brother had still been alive, watching. His throat heaved, his fists itched.

Susan Lei had broken down completely. Fawkes had seen her take down trolls with her bare fists, but now she was weeping on her knees. Throwing dull eyes up toward heaven. Tresckow held her shoulders, knuckles white.

"Oh, Holy Earth Mother preserve us," Behind Fawkes, the Sheriff made a sign, "They're no bigger than children. What sick fragger...?"

Sick fraggers killed and raped children. Fawkes had brought down enough of them. This was a different monster, old as history and bigger than America–but all its horror squatted on every single innocent body, abused and wasted.

"It is an act of domination, not desire." Ilsa Tresckow spoke in a monotone, "She fought back, they thought they would put her in her place. It is our job to fight for those who cannot fight–it's what you do, Susan. We will find the monsters who did this, and we will see them fry in the chair."

Monsters. Fawkes didn't believe in them. Monsters did not rape–it was humans who raped. Humans had done this, slaughtered this innocent family of goblins.

And greenskinned gangers had put two bullets through his vest, three years ago. Thrown down the woman he loved and tore her uniform away…goblins were humans, no better or worse, not monsters. It was all that had stopped him from walking into a chapter house with a gun and killing all of them. If they had taken her, he would have killed every goblin ganger in the City. Painted the streets with their blood until he was dead. But he would never have done _this_, to harmless and ordinary greenskined people.

Eight brats. A tiny goblin, no more than three, had hidden in the space under the floorboards. Shaking so hard, they could barely carry her out in safety; her eyes were black holes down to the pit. Covered by a blanket, as they took her out, stepping over the heaped bodies of her family.

They hadn't been clubbed; they'd been flayed. On the back of the mother's head, all down her back, the skin and flesh had been peeled off to white bone.

Outside, DS Lei stood up, breathed in, snatched one glance at Fawkes. Walked over to the surviving child, knelt down.

"It's okay now. You are safe. Do not be afraid. My name…is Susan…"

VICTIM

She couldn't go on. There were no survivors. Above the goblin child's empty eyes, the word cut into her forehead.

"Mask." The tiny, broken voice, "Skull. Mask…"

-0-

Back at the motel, Fawkes dropped back onto the bed, switched on the TV. Back in the City, there had been another major race riot. Tear gas, rubber bullets–non-lethal to humans, but a goblin went _splat_, they might be lobbied out in a few years. Two dead officers. Four drive by shootings in a week. A human woman found dead in the park, carved with misdrawn goblin runes–by humans who wanted race war, drekhead Goblinslayer copycats, or goblins disguising their murder as such. Tresckow and Dr Goodfellow would know, if they ever got down to that case.

Goblins killed humans; he'd seen it. Raped, tortured–Susan sat with every victim they saw for at least an hour. It wasn't because they remembered the War. The poison gas that had driven them from their holes to waiting machine guns. They were just poor and angry, selfish and stupid, like humans who killed, tortured and raped.

Humans didn't kill so many goblins, officially. Executed droves, but that wasn't murder. Redneck kids in their pickups, on the frontier, would shoot down goblins they passed like rabbits, but it didn't make the news. Only a very sick person would rape a goblin; but torturing something small and weak was a popular sport for the young in many places. For a long time, there had been fanatics, who would mob and stomp goblin workers on their way to the mines or quarries, howling about cheap labour. Or walk into a goblin pow-wow ground or community centre, go crazy with an assault rifle. Goblinslayer was a new kind of nightmare.

First a gang chapter house, wiped out. The Gork day bombings, their biggest festival, three packed assemblies. Riot police had been deployed to all goblin neighbourhoods in anticipation of a backlash, but there was none; the bombs and their dead seemed to have stunned the green community into insensibility.

Then North Island. The camp funded by Goblin Rights, for human and goblin kids from the inner cities. Seeing the videos of their children being hunted with guns had taken a lot of people back to the War; some of the human kids had protected the goblins, but others hadn't. Some kids had killed goblins themselves–with guns to their heads, they said, and Harry believed, but that barely mattered. The Red Prophet, the M.L.K. of Goblin Rights, had said that he no longer believed peaceful change was possible, and the humans who had called North Island an atrocity had fallen silent after the first riots.

The woman who'd been blinded and raped in Atlanta was still being very blonde and white on the talk show circuit, and more goblin kids turned up swinging from lamp posts, each time she choked through the story. Susan, who'd never talked to anyone but Harry about her own assault, wanted to believe she was very brave and very blind rather than a pawn of militant Humanists. An organisation to hate goblins hadn't even been needed in America, before Goblinslayer.

And he had never stopped. Families wiped out all over the City, the whole floor of that apartment…it was at least five killers, but they never left a trace, made no mistakes. No survivors; they rooted screaming infants from where their mothers had hidden them, in the moments before they were caught and flayed. Smashed the babies' skulls on the wall and piled up the bodies. The CPD had sweated blood, tears and brains to trace the Goblinslayer to that apartment by the river. Then Fawkes had picked up the call that six cops were down and dead. When you wanted to wipe an entire species from the earth, there could not be anything you were not prepared to do.

Was that their end goal? Why move from the City to the Farmlands, and where next? Why had they never touched the secret orchards out west, that grew the goblin street gangs their terrible drugs? Half of America would be calling Goblinslayer a hero, if he had led with that–though it was a thorn in Harry's mind to think how many humans called him a hero already.

Why leave one goblin child alive? Would she truly live again, after what they'd done? She had to, there was counselling, surgery…but sometimes nothing was enough. Flesh was flesh.

Harry's head still throbbed. Tresckow was better at this. His only talent was to shoot straight and never stop hunting, never give up…

-0-

He was still lying alone on the bed, in the dark, when his phone rang. It was Susan, from the room down the hall.

"Harry. I can't sleep."

"Love…we're in the field. We need to focus, find these fraggers…"

"You haven't been thinking of anything else, have you?" A sad smile in her voice, "Harry, what you give to this job, what it takes…baby, I'm right here. I need you."

He was already up, fumbling with the door. Heading to her room–no one but Ilsa knew, it was wrong and stupid, but they couldn't live without what they'd held fast to, though such a black storm. Everyone had told her, _quit_, after she'd been beaten half to death, and he'd been the drekhead partner who missed the ambush. Failed her. Failure.

But she'd told him he was a hero who never stopped fighting, he'd told her she was a fighter who would never be defeated, and they'd sealed the truth of their words with their bodies. Risking everything for each other; it was the only way they could fight on, and they would never stop while they still lived.

There was one low light by her bed. Straight dark hair spilt over the pillow. Under the sheet, he knew she was naked.

"My hero." She smiled like sunlight and thunder, "Stay there. Shed it, all that stuff."

Harry pulled off the tie, his drenched shirt. Sat down and deliberately removed his shoes, pants, and boxers, brown eyes fixed on her dark.

"Today. You were strong. You're always strong, you're a miracle–"

"Not feeling it. Those kids…just come to me, please."

Their foreheads kissed. Her hand found his heart. Bare skin against skin, one breath throughout two bodies. Their legs twitched with desire, ripples on a crystal lake. Harry sunk his mind into Susan, the meditation she had taught him, and they were unmoving for ten minutes. Until all untouchable horror had been washed away in their sweat, scoured off by their eyes, and there was nothing but love.

Harry finally kissed her. First light, then long. His hand over her heart pressed the whole curve of her breast, and she smiled as she tossed her head over the pillow.

"Mmmmm...Oh. Harry…."

"Yeah. Say my name." Harry gasped, kissing steadily over jaw and throat, "Wake up everyone, scream it out, I don't care. Nothing but us. You are strong, I will never leave you, we're never going to die…"

Her climax burst like life and death mixed up beyond words. Her muscled thighs clenched his waist so hard he was sore, and if she hadn't bitten the bedsheets her screams would have woken the county. The clasp of their hands was stronger than steel at their side; Harry couldn't imagine, for just a moment, what they couldn't overcome.

The dead were still dead when they had spent themselves. So Susan talked about the hunt, as they lay in bed together. Everything they would do to stop the monster that was devouring their country, child by child. Nothing about them both, their future together. Slaying monsters and saving the innocent, _someday_, together, was the only future that could kill their past. Harry almost fell asleep at her side, until Susan noticed and elbowed him in_ his_ side. He had to slip back to his own bed before morning, parting his fingers from hers one by one.

"Susan? If anything took me from you…would you do any of what Goblinslayer did?"

"I couldn't, my love. None of it."

"If they'd taken you, I'd kill the gangers and drug dealers until I was dead–"

"Because they _took me_ from you? Because you couldn't save me? Harry, you always saved me, and you're better than that. Ilsa said that _revenge_ isn't an act of love either, just self-hate. Goblinslayer is a sick monster, and I promise you we're going to be the heroes who kill him."

* * *

_A/N: Harry Fawkes is Warrior, Susan Lei is Fighter and Ilsa Tresckow is Wizard. Goblin Slayer is Ahab Grey, Priestess is Alison Blanche, Elf Archer is Lowri Greenwood and Sword Maiden is Mary Smith (Notice the decreasing effort in the names?) Lack of names is one of the minor poor qualities of Goblin Slayer, compared to silencing rape victims and creating a race of always-evil rapist to very cheaply stoke outrage and hatred at the expense of female dignity. It might as well have been to fulfil the violent racist fantasies of a 'hero' who would be absolutely avenging his sister by walking into a mosque with a gun, in the real world. Because evil goblin rapists do exist, in the poisonous fantasy worlds of racist murderers, as well as speeches by Donald Trump._


End file.
